Because clothing, sporting goods and other items require a certain amount of hands-on experience, people are checking out their purchases first-hand in retail stores, then going online to get the best deals. This practice has had the effect of turning bricks-and-mortar stores into free Internet showrooms.

Also, because FedEx and other overnight services don't deliver in the evening hours, company mail rooms are becoming clogged with packages being delivered to employees. In other words, e-commerce has turned private workplaces into de facto delivery depots.

Arguing that they're a nascent industry in an electronic world, e-commerce companies are lobbying lawmakers to exempt them from paying local sales taxes even though these companies use a city's police and fire departments and other tax-supported services.

E-commerce also is playing a role in displacing large numbers of the poor in cities, especially San Francisco, where young Internet moguls move into older neighborhoods, displacing low-income people and driving up rents.

The question begs to be asked: Is the e-commerce economy becoming less of a new economy and more a subsidized social burden?

The answer seems to be no - at least not yet.

Perception not yet reality

In the area of retail, the numbers don't bear out the perception. Given all the hype of e-commerce, one would expect that bricks-and-mortar stores would be abandoned as customers hole up in front of their computer screens.

According to analysts, though, less than 2 percent of the estimated $250 trillion in annual retail sales take place over the Internet. And have you walked through Union Square on a Saturday afternoon?

"There's no doubt that people are using stores as showcases for Internet transactions," said Helen Bulwik, a San Francisco retail analyst, "but it's not something that's having any profound real world impact just yet."

Nevertheless, a tiny percentage of $250 trillion is still a big piece of the pie - and losing the sales tax on a fraction of these transactions can add up fast.

According to Forrester Research, an Internet market research firm, the five most populated states are losing out on millions of dollars in tax

revenues.

Speaking in December at a San Francisco hearing on the issue of Internet taxation, South Dakota Gov. William Janklow jested that he was thinking of ways of "stopping those little brown trucks and checking packages."

Until Janklow makes good on that threat, company mail rooms will continue to fill up with employees' Internet-ordered packages. At one large San Francisco law firm, the problem has become so great that high-priced lawyers and their assistants have been commanded to go the mail room themselves to pick up packages obviously labeled from online retail stores.

As the e-commerce economy speeds along, some are having a hard time getting on board, which makes for a bitter pill, considering the whole thing is based on a network of computers started in the 1970s by the U.S. government.

Cultural chasm in the Mission

A recent UC-Berkeley study looking at the growing chasm between young local Internet executives and low-income people in San Francisco's Mission District found a "market failure" with immigrant Latinos and other impoverished minorities locked out of the zoom-zoom culture of the new economy.

"The new economy has widened the gap between the rich and the poor," said Butch Wing, director of the Silicon Valley Project, a Rainbow/PUSH coalition organization headed by the Rev. Jesse Jackson. "There has not been a general lifting up of the whole of society with this new-found prosperity."

Internet tax entitlements, stores used as showrooms, overworked mail clerks, the growing digital divide and self-centered, Web-investor-fueled multimillionaires are all part of the new digital economy. But they're having no effect on investors, who have been pushing the technology-laden Nasdaq stock index to record highs.

As a cultural phenomenon, though, the unsavory aspects of the new economy have created a sort of cultural hangover.

Internet venture capitalist John Doerr, who funded companies such as Netscape Communications and Amazon.com, told a group of online industry leaders last month that he regrets uttering his immortal quote that the technology industry has resulted in "the largest single legal creation of wealth we've witnessed on the planet."

"The Internet was supposed to make us all rich," said Michael Wolff, a New Yorker columnist and author of the Internet-industry-bashing "Burn Rate."

"But people are starting to get the perception that this new economy is going to make a small number of players really rich.